What are these 451 “seen” messages doing? Can I get rid of them? Have I downloaded these before? Rerunning fetchmail keeps telling me about the 451 seen messages and downloading a new set of mails. It’s weird.

Comments

“Seen” are emails in the inbox that fetchmail knows about – it probably caches the headers/msg ids locally, pop3 doesn’t really support this, but clients can hack around. So, basically, if you have emails lingering in the GMail Inbox, they will be listed over and over again whenever you poll via pop3. This may be clearer if you switch to a protocol that actually considers syncing mailboxes and state, i.e. IMAP rather than pop to get your messages from GMail.

– Harald 2013-08-02 21:05 UTC

Incorrect Harald. The same thing happens with IMAP, except I have 740,000 messages in my inbox!